How clips ate the internet

The Vergecast

Vox Media Podcast Network

Tech News, Technology, News

4.3 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2026

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's now surprisingly easy to watch most of a movie without ever trying to, or to spend hours with a podcast without ever playing an episode. In the burgeoning clip economy, everything is being cut into bite-sized pieces and being blasted around the internet hoping to land in your feeds. The Verge's Mia Sato explains the machinery of how all this works, and wonders what it means for our social media experience. After that, The Verge's Victoria Song joins to discuss the Fitbit Air, the new $99 Google fitness tracker she and David have both been testing. It's a fascinating, thoroughly AI-ified device, and it actually has some pretty good ideas. (And some bad ones!) Finally, Vee sticks around to help David answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email vergecast@theverge.com!) about smart glasses, and whether helping you find your other gear might just be a killer app. Further reading: Inside the cutthroat community of ‘clippers’ Google’s taking a big swing at AI health with the Fitbit Air What’s the role of a simple fitness band in the AI health era? All these smart glasses and nothing to do Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11. (Timestamps are approximate.) 00:00:00 Brick Your Phone 00:03:00 Clips Go Industrial 00:06:00 How Clipping Platforms Work 00:08:00 Why It Looks Organic 00:11:00 Clavicular Case Study 00:13:00 Shady or Just Marketing 00:20:00 Platform Rules and Reality 00:26:00 Slop and the Future of Clips 00:36:00 Watch Band Color Debate 00:38:00 Why Fitbit Air Matters 00:40:00 Whoop Dupe Or Fitbit Roots 00:45:00 Google Health AI Coach 00:50:00 Limits And Lab Upload Friction 00:53:00 Privacy And Data Tradeoffs 00:56:00 AI Health Personalities Compared 01:04:00 Hotline Smart Glasses Tracking 01:09:00 Future Of All Day Glasses 01:13:00 Wrap Up Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Virchcast, the flagship podcasts of whoop doops.
0:05.5	I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here redoing my brick for the first time in forever.
0:11.6	So I have this brick that I bought forever ago, and it's basically just this little gray rectangle that you tap your phone against to make your phone less bad.
0:20.5	You can set it so that it turns off all
0:22.3	your social media apps, whatever you want. I had a really good run going of not having
0:27.6	threads and Blue Sky and Twitter and YouTube and TikTok and everything else on my phone.
0:33.2	And then they all came back onto my phone. So the brick is what is saving me from it.
0:38.6	Basically now, from the beginning of the workday until after my kids go to bed, my phone
0:44.1	tries to stay bricked. And this thing mostly lives right behind me, but sometimes has to go upstairs
0:50.1	with me because sometimes they need to unbrick and I'm too lazy. And it might be defeating
0:53.6	the purpose, but we're trying. Anyway, we're going to do two things on the show today. First,
0:59.0	we're going to talk to Miyasato about her story on the clip economy and the ways in which clips
1:05.3	from shows and podcasts and everything have become a content form unto themselves. Then V-Song is going to come on and talk about this device that I'm wearing right now, the Fitbit Air, which she and I have both been testing and have lots of thoughts about. We also have a really fun hotline question about smart glasses, lots to get to. It's going to be a really great episode. But I'm going to go unbreak my phone and watch TikTok for like 40 to 60 minutes,
1:28.6	and then we'll be right back. This is the Vergecast. See you and say.
1:31.7	Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped
1:36.8	spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they
1:42.2	want to, but because building internal tools
1:44.4	means weeks of waiting
1:45.4	on someone else's backlog.
1:47.2	That's where Retool comes in.
1:49.0	Build custom internal tools
1:50.3	just by describing what you need.
	...

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